New York indie rockers The Upsides charge headlong into the uncertainty of adulthood on ‘In the Maze,’ a roaring, emotionally expansive sophomore album where smoldering guitars and thunderous drums propel irresistible choruses, giving life’s upheavals an exhilarating sense of release. Born from years of friendship and renewed creative ambition, the record is as catchy as it is cathartic – a full-throttle reckoning with the paths we choose, the dreams we chase, and the people who keep us grounded through it all. That same restless spirit erupts in the album’s searing title track and its striking music video, premiering exclusively on Atwood Magazine, alongside an intimate interview and track-by-track commentary on ‘In the Maze’ that highlights the personal stories and artistic breakthroughs behind the band’s most ambitious music yet.

Stream: “In the Maze” – The Upsides

The Upsides have never sounded more certain of themselves than they do on an album about everything they can’t control.

Over the past two years, the New York indie rock band have weathered breakups, new relationships, unexpected evictions, the arrival of a child, and the increasingly complicated questions that accompany adulthood. Through it all, they’ve found strength, purpose, and a renewed creative conviction in making music together. Their captivating sophomore album, In the Maze, out this Friday, October 16 via Dream Wolf Records, channels those turbulent experiences into their boldest, most emotionally ambitious work yet – a thrilling collision of muscular guitars, driving rhythms, infectious melodies, atmospheric synths, and sweeping orchestral arrangements. It’s a record about confronting life’s uncertainty, reckoning with the passage of time, and finding your own way forward, even when the path ahead remains unclear.

Brushing off a daze, looming over me
Take a turn in the maze, only I can leave

The trouble on your tongue
Where’s it taking me?
You match your father’s punch
Now that’s a tough belief
You should try the church
Robby made another law, count two
While I bless the curse
Robbin’ me climbin’
through the wall, I lose

Better make your mind up
if you really wanna talk
A moment to know me
on the sidewalk chalk
Make your mind up
if you really wanna talk
There’s one small devil in your lies

– “In the Maze,” The Upsides

For The Upsides, that sense of solidarity runs deep. Brothers Matt (vocals, guitar) and Dan Fullam (drums) grew up in Randolph, New Jersey, where their earliest musical experiences intersected with those of bassist Matt DaSilva. Friendships formed through college and chance encounters eventually brought lead guitarist Hart Mechlin and multi-instrumentalist Pat Freeman into the fold, with the five musicians building a shared creative identity in New York City. Their 2024 self-titled debut drew upon the jangling charm of ‘90s guitar pop and the spirited, scrappy energy of the early-2000s New York rock revival. In the Maze takes that foundation somewhere more forceful, textured, and adventurous, embracing the visceral intensity of grunge and alternative rock without abandoning the irresistible hooks and melodic instincts that have long defined their sound.

The seeds of this transformation were planted in June 2024, when Matt, Dan, and Hart escaped to a secluded house in Parksville, New York, for ten days of uninterrupted songwriting. Armed with ten-song inspiration playlists, a willingness to swap instruments, and the freedom to experiment, they emerged with more than half the material that would eventually become In the Maze. The full band later reconvened at The Building, a converted church in Marlboro, New York, before spending months refining arrangements and lyrics at Freeman’s Brooklyn studio. Mixed by Austin Asvanonda (Sam Fender, The War on Drugs), with additional production from Nick Perri and string arrangements by Richard Jones and Laura Moody of Elysian Collective, the finished record reflects a band pushing its collective imagination further than ever before, bringing greater depth and complexity to the stories they’ve lived.

And at the center of it all is the friendship that has sustained them through years of personal upheaval. The band has become a source of stability amid the unpredictability of their individual lives. “It all felt like a bit of a thresher to navigate at times, but we feel incredibly lucky to still be making music here together and having that be a mainstay in our lives,” they tell Atwood Magazine. This enduring connection also shapes how they work: Artists who trust one another enough to poke at ideas, navigate disagreements, and keep pushing until a song reaches its full potential. Their approach is collaborative to its core, with each member contributing to the writing and arrangements and the strongest ideas ultimately prevailing.

The Upsides © Alex Brown

The Upsides describe In the Maze in three words: “bold, layered, honest.”

All three speak to the heightened expectations they placed upon themselves throughout the process, and the enormous personal investment required to bring these eleven songs to life. “We wanted to pour more of ourselves into this album, both sonically and lyrically, instead of just chipping away at it when time allowed,” the band explain. That meant stepping away from their careers, surrendering personal time, and refusing to settle for arrangements or lyrics that hadn’t reached their full potential. Every story on the album draws from real experiences, with the band approaching each song as an opportunity to challenge themselves and each other. The resulting music embraces the contradictions of growing older, balancing exhilarating possibility with the fear of failure, the pull of nostalgia with the urgency of the present, and the desire for stability with the instinct to keep chasing a dream.

Those tensions find a particularly explosive outlet in “Very Bad Kids,” the roaring indie rock anthem that first introduced this new chapter back in May. Described by Atwood Magazine as “a feverish, full-body jolt of indie rock, all heat and hustle and glorious forward momentum,” the song builds around a formidable guitar riff Hart Mechlin first developed in 2022, channeling all that explosive energy into a deceptively vulnerable examination of commitment, partnership, and doubt. Beneath its exhilarating chorus lies a plea for honesty, even when admitting second thoughts could jeopardize everything two people have worked to build together.

The fiery “Say Follow” channels the guilt and anxiety of ambition into a similarly forceful performance, its insistent rhythms and bruising refrain confronting the pressure to succeed while everyone around you seems to be pursuing a more conventional life. Born from a late-night listening session involving Audioslave, the song’s propulsive drum pattern became one of the earliest indications that The Upsides were heading into heavier territory. Both tracks marry the physical exhilaration of rock ‘n’ roll with the psychological strain of trying to figure out what comes next.

Elsewhere, the atmospheric “Pretending It Fades” broadens the album’s sonic and psychological horizons, transforming the aftermath of a six-year relationship into a nuanced reflection on loss, healing, and the ways our experiences permanently reshape us. What began as an endlessly looping progression of drums, bass, and synthesizers evolved through painstaking rewrites and rearrangements, eventually finding its defining musical character in a stirring string quartet that replaced the band’s original synth ideas. The arrangement was a revelation, opening the door to orchestral contributions elsewhere on the record and giving the song’s poignant exploration of grief an even more affecting dimension. Rather than presenting heartbreak as a wound that eventually disappears, “Pretending It Fades” considers what it means to live with the person you’ve become because of it.

On “Fast Angel,” The Upsides bring the complications of their own creative partnership into focus. Beneath its relationship-oriented lyrics lies an intimate reflection on the band’s internal dynamics, the delicate balance between speaking up, stepping back, and remaining committed to one another through inevitable tensions. Musically, the song itself embodies their evolution, its brisk, surf rock foundations recalling the buoyant spirit of their debut before an unruly, explosive finish reveals the darker, more uninhibited band they’ve become. There’s an appealing honesty in that contrast, an acknowledgment that even the friendships that keep us grounded demand patience, compromise, and the willingness to listen.

Perhaps nowhere does In the Maze reveal its capacity for emotional depth more profoundly than on “New Jersey in the 90s,” a haunting, synth-laden reflection on childhood, memory, and the loss of innocence. Rooted in Matt and Dan Fullam’s upbringing in suburban New Jersey, the song revisits the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when a neighboring family lost their father in the attacks. The brothers remember riding bikes with the family’s children in the following week, listening as their friends held out hope that their father might still be found. The family eventually moved away, but their absence lingered, becoming part of the brothers’ understanding of a childhood whose innocence had been irrevocably changed.

Once it’s time,
that once seems to fly
Find your fun, make a run
then you’re done make it all count son
I flip back in a haze
Never shoulda changed,
man it all seems strange
If you found some meaning,
I just don’t see it

Tell me more
Will you still be a memory?
Tell me more
New Jersey in the 90s rewind me
Go easy now, if ya know how

Years later, those memories have taken on new meaning, their warmth and sorrow inseparable. There is a devastating beauty to the song’s wistful melodies, hazy production, and fleeting runtime, an acknowledgment that growing older doesn’t necessarily bring us closer to understanding the events that shaped us. The band call it the album’s grounding song, one that brings them back to themselves. Fittingly, its creation proved intensely personal: When Matt first sang the song’s final lines on acoustic guitar in Dan’s former Brooklyn bedroom, both brothers broke down in tears. It’s an extraordinary moment of emotional honesty, preserved in a song that reaches back toward childhood with equal measures of gratitude, grief, and longing.

Up on your roof, caught
a glimmer on the glass
and a cleaned-up past
If it all feels new, what ya said
still lasts when my mind goes back
Bikin’ out in the rain,
you moved, we changed,
The ghosts still play
I saw the lights all 24 times,
towers in the night sky

Tell me more
Will you still be a memory?
Tell me more
New Jersey in the 90s rewind me
Go easy now, if ya know how
What left this town, went away to another

The sunset, the shingles
They all fade into colors
Well sometimes, I’m on my own
I think of you and your brothers

And then there’s “In the Maze” itself, the album’s commanding opening salvo (premiering today, exclusively on Atwood Magazine). Inspired by Dan Fullam’s harrowing experience with a hostile landlord and the instability of moving repeatedly, the thunderous title track channels confusion, frustration, and mounting desperation into the band’s loudest, most ferocious recording to date. Its beginnings were remarkably spontaneous: Dan awoke one morning, half asleep and listening to an argument in the apartment downstairs, and scribbled down the words that would become the song’s opening. What started as an instinctive response to an unbearable situation eventually grew into the album’s defining statement. In an almost uncanny coincidence, long after the record had been named, a mover navigating the winding hallways of Dan’s storage facility remarked that he felt like he was in a maze.

Musically, “In the Maze” is a tremendous declaration of intent, its imposing guitars, hard-hitting percussion, and impassioned vocals announcing a more formidable, confrontational side of The Upsides. Hart Mechlin’s adventurous lead guitar work gives the arrangement an especially restless edge, while Matt Fullam’s fervent delivery builds toward a cathartic outro that captures the urgency coursing through the entire record: “Cigarette smoke bouncing off a cold shoulder / Time backs me in a corner / Church bells getting closer.” Those bells might announce a wedding or a funeral, a joyous new beginning or a devastating farewell. Their significance lies in the uncertainty – and in the knowledge that, whatever comes next, life will continue moving forward. It’s an especially powerful image for an album born from so many personal crossroads, and a fitting introduction to a band embracing its next chapter with tremendous conviction.

The accompanying music video amplifies that intensity with a striking, industrial aesthetic that places The Upsides themselves at the center of the action. Stark black-and-white footage, shadowy corridors, and disorienting close-ups collide with dramatic flashes of crimson and amber light, as the camera moves between the full band performing together and intimate glimpses of its individual members. Scenes of Matt Fullam navigating seemingly endless backstage passageways bring the song’s title vividly to life, while the band’s performance unfolds with a visceral immediacy all its own. There’s a sleekness to the video’s presentation, a flair for theatricality and drama, but its greatest strength is its candid, unvarnished portrait of The Upsides completely immersed in their craft. With the release of In the Maze just days away, it’s an invigorating glimpse of these five musicians doing what they do best: Coming together, plugging in, and letting the music speak for itself.

Better make your mind up
if you really wanna talk
A moment to know me
on the sidewalk chalk
Make your mind up
if you really wanna talk
There’s one small devil in your lies

Cigarette smoke bouncing
off a cold shoulder
Time backs me in a corner
Church bells getting closer
Counting what I owe ya
Cross hairs in the foyer
Everybody in the end’s
Got some damage I can show ya

Yet for all its urgency, In the Maze ultimately makes room for reflection.

The restless “Limbo” confronts the tendency to recognize happiness only after the moment has passed, while the poignant closing ballad “Sepia” brings the album’s preoccupation with memory, ambition, and time into striking focus. What began as an upbeat indie rock song eventually became a sweeping orchestral finale, its delicate strings and affecting lyricism inviting listeners to reconsider what they value most. The arrangements moved the musicians to tears during recording, and Matt Fullam has described the strings-only outro of “Sepia” as a passage that sounds as though it could have been written a century ago. In those final thirty seconds, the album’s turbulent emotions give way to a graceful, almost timeless sense of perspective. “A dream we oughta keep / as the sepia bleeds,” Fullam sings, holding onto hope even as the years continue slipping by.

It’s a moving conclusion to a record that recognizes how easily we can lose sight of the present while worrying about the future or longing for the past. Through eleven songs of personal reckoning, musical discovery, and uncompromising self-expression, The Upsides arrive at a deceptively simple realization: There’s tremendous value in appreciating what we have even as we continue pursuing what we want. “While these songs might provide more questions than answers, there is a beauty to that level of curiosity,” the band reflect. And perhaps that’s the greatest revelation of In the Maze: The path forward may remain uncertain, but so much of what makes life worth living is already right in front of us.

Taken as a whole, In the Maze is an electrifying reminder of just how much a rock band can accomplish when its members push each other to their creative limits.

The guitars snarl, churn, and burst open; the bass and drums propel the songs with an almost impatient pulse; and the keys and strings reveal unexpected depths beneath all that glorious distortion. There’s real drama in these arrangements, in the way a riff tightens its grip, a melody rises above the noise, or a sudden orchestral flourish changes the emotional temperature altogether. And through it all, The Upsides never lose sight of the hook. These eleven songs are fiercely dynamic, relentlessly engaging, and downright irresistible, delivering the full-throttle excitement of rock ‘n’ roll with the melodic sophistication and emotional intensity to make every chorus, instrumental breakdown, and soaring climax count.

What makes In the Maze hit so hard, though, is the exhilarating interplay between its musical firepower and the lives unfolding within its lyrics. Matt Fullam sings with urgency and conviction, his voice carrying the weight of doubt, desire, frustration, and hard-earned perspective through arrangements that constantly surge, swell, and shift beneath him. There’s an enormous physical pleasure to this music, a visceral rush in the band’s chemistry and the way their individual performances lock together, even as the stories they tell confront some of life’s most difficult questions. The result is as catchy as it is cathartic, as emotionally affecting as it is sonically charged – a vibrant, dramatic, wonderfully restless album that rewards both the impulse to turn the volume all the way up and the desire to listen closely. The Upsides have poured themselves into every corner of this record, and that commitment comes roaring out of the speakers.

For drummer Dan Fullam, that urgency speaks to the very essence of In the Maze. Life presents us with an endless series of crossroads, and the decisions that bring one person happiness and fulfillment might leave another wondering what could have been. There’s no universal blueprint for a life well lived, and perhaps the greatest risk is spending so much time agonizing over which direction to take that we never give ourselves the chance to find out. “I think the smartest people, regardless of what they accomplish in life, find that there are zero universally ‘right’ answers to anything,” Fullam reflects. “You do your best, and then you’re dead basically. So go for what you want – the job, the partner, the creative endeavor – and go for it now.”

Below, The Upsides open up about the making of In the Maze, the experiences that inspired its songs, and the creative breakthroughs that have redefined their sound. Life may have given them little control over what came next, but together, they’ve made a record that sounds more confident, vital, and assured than ever. Read on for our intimate interview and track-by-track with the band, and stream “In the Maze” exclusively on Atwood Magazine ahead of its release!

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:: stream/purchase In the Maze here ::

:: connect with The Upsides here ::

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Stream: ‘In the Maze’ – The Upsides

A CONVERSATION WITH THE UPSIDES

The Upsides: The writing started in June 2024, right after we released our first album. Matt, Dan and Hart rented a house in Upstate NY for 10 days, and we treated the writing sessions as a total blank canvas, even swapping instruments at points to stir up some new ideas. Everyone made a mandatory 10-song playlist of songs to either be directly inspired from or just help stir an ancillary idea, and it’s really interesting looking back now how those playlists either directly or indirectly inspired some drum patterns, production choices, chord choices and more. It was clear even early on that we wanted to pull from some heavier and more emotionally dynamic influences than our debut album. We wrote about half of the record in Parksville, but this trip really created the foundation for the entire album and reinvigorated our creative process.

The Upsides: We wanted to pour more of ourselves into this album, both sonically and lyrically, instead of just chipping away at it when time allowed. That meant stepping away from careers for a bit, sacrificing a ton of personal free time. The result of this approach still has the ‘band in the room’ organic Upsides sound that we eventually captured for the album at The Building studio in Marlboro, but there are definitely more layers and we feel a lot more depth to the songs that came about from the five month post-production period at Pat’s studio in Brooklyn. This expanded the sonics, but we also spent a ton of time meticulously rewriting lyrics until every song felt like it earned its place on the album. We really tried to eliminate any ‘good enoughs.’ One of our close friends recently described the first few singles as a ‘punch in the gut’ sonically and lyrically, which is just about exactly the feeling we would hope for on this album.

The lyrics also have more weight and meaning, at least to us, as we made it a point that all the stories weaved throughout the album are all real life experiences. The vision from Day 1 has been “let’s write this collaboratively” and hold ourselves to the highest standard. That goes for lyrics, guitar parts, tambourine parts, etc. While some bands might not thrive with several cooks in the kitchen, we have a great deal of trust and respect for one another, and we think this collaborative approach really brings out the best of what each band member has to offer. We also have a really unique relationship with the head of our label Miles Paterson – founder of Dream Wolf Records, who pushes us to spread our wings creatively while also providing some really valuable creative input at times given his encyclopedia-like knowledge of indie rock.

The Upsides: Living in New York City the past several years has been a bit of a maze to navigate. Each band member has had huge life events happen and has had to make some difficult life decisions the past few years. Relationships have ended, relationships have started, evictions that were out of our control have happened, our bassist had his first beautiful daughter. It all felt like a bit of a thresher to navigate at times, but we feel incredibly lucky to still be making music here together and having that be a mainstay in our lives. Writing this album has been extremely cathartic and has been our way of navigating these highs and lows, together.

The Upsides: Looking back, we are still extremely proud of our debut and still love those songs especially now that we’ve had some space from them. But just naturally after pouring two years of dedicated work into our second album, the debut feels a bit more like a patchwork of what our potential could be as a band. We think ‘In The Maze’ is a pretty confident step in the direction of ‘here is what we are capable of at full capacity.’ Hopefully it showcases The Upsides as a professional indie rock act capable of producing a cohesive yet still dynamic album, as the melting pot of our influences and ideas will never find us in one simple lane for any album. But we think every fledgling demo idea that eventually made its way to the final album was seen all the way through to its full potential. We also were a bit more hesitant to take risks for our first album. For ‘In The Maze’, we let our hair down and pushed each other to embrace more vulnerability lyrically and be bolder sonically.

And what’s maybe most exciting is that we already did another upstate writing trip in late September of 2026. We feel like the songwriting machine is still churning and to strike while it’s hot. While we needed a year of recalibration of demos after the first album to find our lane, it doesn’t feel like we’ll need much time at all now to have another album on our hands.

The Upsides: The backstory of this one stemmed from Dan being forced out of his apartment in October 2025 due to an absurd and hostile landlord family situation, and then having to move a number of times since then due to some more bad luck. Dan just woke up one day in the midst of listening to an argument in the apartment downstairs and immediately jotted something down half asleep, asked the band what we could do with it, and the exact words are what became the intro and a springboard to finish the rest of the song. It all came full circle in Dan’s latest move just this month when one of his movers remarked how it felt like he was in a maze as they walked through the long hallways of a storage center, well after the song and album was named.

The intro of the song feels like a band rising from a swamp and slumber, in this case 2 years of songwriting, to indicate a new chapter is coming. It’s the heaviest and loudest thing we’ve ever done, and we really love the juxtaposition of this song with the single before it ‘New Jersey in the 90s’ which is one of the more subtle and vulnerable songs we’ve ever done. The title itself we think does a good job of suggesting a lot of questions will be asked, but there’s little guarantee we’ll be able to provide any of the answers ourselves.

The Upsides: Well, that’s first off amazing to hear it struck you that way, it still does for us too. That one feels like the grounding song of the album. It may not be the centerpiece or north star lyrically or sonically, but it feels a bit like home both literally and figuratively. It’s really just truly us at our core, at our most vulnerable and at a little over two minutes long it was intentionally designed to leave you wanting something more. It honestly felt like a song that needed to be written, like we almost didn’t have a choice to write something this cathartic and true to ourselves.

Matt: “A dream we ought to keep, as the Sepia Bleeds” (album closer – ‘Sepia’)

Reminds me to keep dreaming big and wring out the towel, even as the clock keeps on ticking.

Hart: “I stumble on Belgian block through streets…I smell the rain on wood, the gas catching flame” (‘Pretending It Fades’)

The band really pushed for personal and specific lyrics on this song, so there’s a lot of imagery drawn from real experiences, and the result very strongly evokes a real time and place for me. It was actually difficult to initially demo these lyrics as I kept getting emotional.

Dan: “cigarette smoke bouncing off a cold shoulder // time backs me in a corner // church bells getting closer” (‘In The Maze’)

The start of this outro feels like the boldest thing we’ve ever done and honestly makes me excited to continue making music with this band forever. The words themselves paint such a vivid picture of New York City, and the church bells getting closer line pretty much encapsulates this album as a whole to me. There’s an impending sense of the clock ticking, major life decisions getting made. Are the bells a joyous wedding starting? Or the start of a funeral? Regardless, they are a marker that life is moving along at a fast clip, and the time is now to stop putting off whatever it is you have been.

Matt: The Elysian String Collective (Fontaines D.C., Florence and the Machine, Pulp) recorded string arrangements on four songs (Pretending It Fades, Sepia, Telepathic and Limbo). The arrangements and performances really elevated these songs and even brought the band to tears during the recording. For me, the ‘strings only’ outro on Sepia feels like it could have been written 100 years ago, but it somehow ties the whole album together in the final 30 seconds. Also, singing the outro to “In the Maze” is the most cathartic moment I’ve experienced with The Upsides. This outro taps into some emotions buried beneath the surface, but it still feels authentic to me and where we’re at as a band in 2026.

Dan: I’ll never forget the moment Matt sang the outro to New Jersey in the 90s just playing his acoustic in my old bedroom in Brooklyn (he still lives in that apartment) and we both broke down, it just triggered a flood of memories and emotions. Additionally, I think Hart’s lead guitar work on ‘In The Maze’ is some of the coolest stuff I’ve ever heard, let alone been involved with writing. We pushed him hard to keep tweaking and pushing the boundaries on that song and he responded, coming up with parts that truly make that song the beast that it is. And selfishly the drums on ‘Say Follow’ are just the most fun thing to play, I could loop that for days on end if I was forced to.

Hart: Hearing the final mix of “Pretending it Fades” after a week of intensive mixing in Burbank (shoutout Austin) was a pretty special moment for me. This song started as a loop of drums, bass and synth that we just couldn’t stop playing, so we knew the core musical idea was strong, but it was not an easy process to build that loop into something you could call a song…we went through endless rearrangements, rewrites, re-recordings (I bought two guitars specifically to get the rhythm guitar part right) and lyric overhauls before landing on the final version. I’m proud of how the band stuck to the vision and high standards we had for this one, and there’s a ton of emotion from all of us in the final record.

The Upsides: Bold, layered, honest

The Upsides: We hope this album makes listeners feel something, and continue to carve their own path instead of following down the beaten one. Writing and recording this album has been our way of navigating the ups and downs over the past few years, together. While these songs might provide more questions than answers, there is a beauty to that level of curiosity. We poured every ounce of ourselves into these songs, and we hope that authenticity resonates.

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:: stream/purchase In the Maze here ::

:: connect with The Upsides here ::

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:: Inside In the Maze ::

In The Maze

This song is a story about Dan being forced out of his apartment in Brooklyn due to an absurd landlord situation in 2025, and having to move a number of times since then. It speaks to how you can become warped mentally in a situation like that and almost get stuck in a stockholm syndrome of sorts. Dan just woke up one day in the midst of it and immediately jotted something down half asleep, asked the band what we could do with it, and the exact words are what became the intro and a springboard to finish the rest of the song. It really came full circle in Dan’s latest move when one of his movers remarked how it felt like he was in a maze as they walked through the long hallways of a storage center, well after the song and album was named. The song was really just in a skeleton demo state at the time Dan tracked drums on it in Marlboro, and really took awhile to find its footing in the post-production period in terms of layers and melodies. The lead guitar work might be some of our favorite Hart has ever written. Given how late this song came about in the writing process, our aptitude to take some risks on lead guitar and vocals was there for the taking, but that all felt very natural during the recording process versus forced. More recently, we’ve talked about using this song as inspiration for future writing as well.

Very Bad Kids

This riff had actually been kicking about since 2022. It just sat on Hart’s computer for a while before someone brought up a memory of it at a dinner after the Parksville trip and we unearthed the file to begin its resuscitation. We had been covering The Cars a bit back in 2022 so that’s probably where that heavy 80s-style power chords riff came from. Very Bad Kids is a song about commitment, partnership and doubt. Some of the most complex emotions happen around big decisions or commitments – one moment you’re zealously bought into the mission, and the next you’re tearing it all down with questions. This dynamic gets exponentially more interesting in a group setting, and we wanted to explore the vulnerability of admitting you have doubts while having to rely on those around you for help.

Say Follow

We all have very vivid memories of listening to Audioslave one night after coming home from this place Cabaret Frank’s we would go to in Parksville, and Dan immediately kicked up the intro drum pattern which seemed to just spill out of his sticks and never changed to the final recording. It took basically no time at all to find the chords, and this idea was definitely our first inclination that this new batch of material would lean in a heavier direction. The primary emotions in this song are guilt, worthiness, and comparison. You might say there is privilege, or even frivolity, in focusing on making art, and these feelings are amplified by constant comparison to what most logical people would say you ‘should’ be doing. There’s an inherent anxiety in the song but at the same time it is extremely cathartic to play it, and it’s typically been the last song we’ve been playing in our live set with an extended outro.

Pretending It Fades

Similar to “Say Follow,” we looped this progression for literally hours up in Parksville after we found the drum beat and progression. Hart was typically on the Nord keyboard for it up there messing with synth layers, with Matt switching between guitar and bass and experimenting with melodies, while Dan did his best impression of whoever played or programmed the Kate Bush ‘Running Up That Hill’ beat. It is probably the most straightforward ‘breakup song’ on the album at its core, but while there is some imagery specific to a romantic relationship we worked really hard and rewrote a lot of these lyrics so that there’s a more general and nuanced message around loss. At first the chorus might read as “these wounds are taking longer to heal than I thought” but as a whole the lyrics say something more like “maybe these aren’t actually wounds, maybe I’m just getting used to a new shape.”

Like the lyrics, this was one that took some time to get right in the post production phase. Originally the demo had a more ‘80s-style production to it, before we sent over our synth ideas to Rich Jones of Elysian Collective. His arrangement which eventually utilized a string quartet instead of synths absolutely blew us away and added some incredible melodies that we certainly will not take credit for. Listening to his work on this arrangement also opened up the door for strings on a number of other tracks on the rest of the album, which started to make things feel much more anthemic and bolder.

New Jersey in the 90s

We wanted to make this one feel lyrically and instrumentally like the hazy, golden-hued memories Matt and Dan have of growing up in NJ. The story specifically speaks to our neighbor’s dad who passed away in 9/11. A particular memory that always stuck in our head was riding bikes the week after and his kids, who were our friends, talking about holding out hope as they were continuing to find people. The family moved away a year or so after and their memory hung in the air like ghosts for awhile. We really were conscious to not make it some sort of tribute song however, more so a cathartic way of making sense of something terrible that happened and at least partially changed the course of our childhood even though we are extremely grateful for the childhood we had in middle class New Jersey. We recently put up a TikTok with BTS footage from the music video we made for it back in our hometown of Randolph, and it was really cool to see how many people it specifically reached there. It even made it to the great-granddaughter of one of our other next-door neighbors.

Musically, the original demo chords had been kicking around since shortly after the Parksville trip, but something about how the original demo felt irked Dan. It was more in the ‘feel good indie rock’ boppy world than playing ball with the more emotional heavy material of the rest of the album. Pat raised his hand to do a rework of the original demo on a cross-country flight to change the emotional complexity of it a bit and nailed it. We actually retracked the bass guitar at the last minute at The War on Drugs studio where we finished mixing the album, which seemed proper as it feels like the Drugs-iest song we’ve ever written.

Telepathic

When living with your significant other for a while, you begin to develop a telepathic way of communicating with them. This can be used to your advantage, to anticipate what they’re thinking and act accordingly. It can also be a huge disadvantage, if you assume something but are entirely misreading body language or other non-verbal cues. That’s how we would describe these lyrics, which are purposely a bit more opaque versus making it obvious what the song is saying. This is Matt’s favorite drum beat on the album, and it definitely harkens back to when we used to cover Incubus songs in high school; Dan would be wearing a backwards baseball hat like every drummer from California at the time and bassist Matt DaSilva was on a 5-string bass like the 311 bassist. Dan has since ditched that fashion choice and the 5-string bass has found a new home.

The string arrangement from Richard Jones once again brought out the darker, more pensive side of this song and crucially made it feel less like a standard ‘garage band’ arrangement. The strings we find make the listening experience less ‘oh that’s what the guitar is doing, that’s what the drums are doing I get it’ and instead it turns into a much more dynamic, complex thing that evokes an emotional response rather than a cursory assessment of what the individual band members are doing.

Fast Angel

This song is actually about the inner workings of the band, although the lyrics never spell that out directly at all. It speaks to the uncertainty of when to speak up, when to sit back, the temporary tensions that inevitably arise but the “all in” mentality that prevails regardless. It can just as easily be interpreted as an assessment of any relationship. Our label even thought at first that it was a societal take with some political connotations, which if that’s true it would only be subconsciously. Similar to Telepathic, we may be guilty of some more opaque lyrics at times, but we’ve always loved lyrics that are not easy to pin down at first and can be interpreted as the listener wishes. That just always seems more interesting to us than something overly obvious and spelled out so clearly it can’t be interpreted in more than one way.

We’ve always felt “Fast Angel” was a bit of a ‘bridge song’ between our first album and In The Maze. While the surf rock tempo and overall vibe is somewhat similar to our debut, the outro explodes into something that was certainly not on that album and indicates to us there’s something a little darker, brasher and less inhibited on the horizon.

Twist Our Fate

This was actually the last song to make the cut for the album, and we’re really glad it did. Austin’s (Asvanonda) final mix really made it gel with the rest of the album, and we particularly love the feeling you get from the ‘80s-esque synths Pat dialed in. We’ve loved this band Night Moves out of Minneapolis for years, and their smoky midwest DNA might have seeped the most into this one.

Thematically this song even feels like a midwest whiskey hangover to us, like waking up in a motel in middle America. The ‘last rocket’ is again that comparison game alluded to in Say Follow, feeling like you’ve been left behind on a planet when a lot of others are choosing a more stable path.

Space Monkey

This was an early song to come out of the Parksville trip. Hart kind of popped up one morning to the room we had set up with all of our gear with the chords and an early version of the chorus melody. We were tempted to make the verse a bit less weird in the post-production phase, but looking back now we’re glad we kept that slinky world alive before it opens up to what we feel is one of the stronger hooks we’ve written. I think what gave us the confidence to do that was pulling the instrumental hook forward to start the song while still leaving out the knocking drums and vocal melody for the true choruses. Lyrically the song explores the dynamics of a relationship on the brink, and the rollercoaster of emotions inherent in that dynamic. The verses almost have a false sense of flippant confidence, while the choruses admit a vulnerability in not wanting to let go and that the grass may not be greener on the other side.

Limbo

We have lived in NYC for over ten years, and while it feels like home, it also still sometimes feels like a really long vacation. The city that often never lets you sleep can make you constantly feel in limbo, asking questions late at night, ‘dodging devils.’ One of our favorite lyrics in this song is “I’m only happy in hindsight” which just sort of speaks to our shared flaw of often overthinking things in the moment only to later realize how perfect things once were if only we could have zoomed out from the momentary stressors. This theme also ties the song directly to Sepia, hence why they are tracklisted right next to one another. We were initially hesitant to try a string arrangement on this song, as the progression and tempo are a bit quicker and we couldn’t envision how a cinematic string section might fit in. However, Laura Moody’s arrangement threaded the needle perfectly, and in particular made the outro the perfect segwue into the album closer.

Sepia

This song dives into the idea that everything we could ever want or need is right in front of us, but we are too distracted or busy chasing other things that we think are more important at the time. “Under my nose” is stealing this same idea from Marty’s monologue in True Detective Season 1, he used those words when talking about this. It also touches on how “time” changes what is “necessary” in order to be satisfied. This song actually started out as a faster, upbeat indie-surf song with gained up guitars. Somewhere along the writing process, we decided to completely turn it on its head, slow it down to a ballad tempo and add strings, which really opened up the doors for an epic album closer. Our close friend B. Miles sang the backing vocals in each Chorus, which added a beautiful layer to close out the album. We haven’t made a music video for this one (yet) but the outro feels like the ending of a mid-1900s wedding where you’re sitting on a hilltop at dusk flipping through an old family book of photos, watching your whole life flash by, and appreciating every up and down that led you to this one moment.

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